Jordan St. John, Special to QMI Agency

It’s January in Canada, and for the majority of us, that means sitting enraptured in front of a 52 inch TV, hoping that this will be the year your team doesn’t completely collapse on the way to the Stanley Cup. That kind of optimism requires sustenance. In Toronto, it requires a lot of sustenance. You’ll need beer, but you’ll also need that king of bar food: The chicken wing.

The chicken wing comes with a number of options depending on where you’re ordering them, but let’s spare a moment to think about the platform the sauces and dips are building upon. From a purely tactile point of view, the chicken wing works because it requires some, but not all of your attention. From a flavour standpoint, the wing is considered white meat, and as such, derives most of its flavour from the cooking process. Whether they’re plain or breaded, fried, baked or grilled, the majority of the actual flavour is coming from the skin browning.

On a basic level, some of the same chemical reactions take place in cooking as take place in kilning barley (it’s the third phase of malting). It’s for this reason that beer and chicken wings make such a great combination.

This means that no matter what beer you order with your wings, you’re on the right track. All I can help you do is make better choices.

For wings glazed with BBQ sauce, there are a couple of ways that you can go. You can try and match the caramelized sugars in the sauce by ordering a darker, maltier ale. Mainstream selections in that category might lean towards something like Rickard’s Red, but we can do a little better than that with Eephus from Toronto’s Left Field brewery or 10W30 from Neustadt. If you wanted to go with hops to compliment the spices in the BBQ sauce, you might try Baby Back Hops IPA from Edmonton’s Hog’s Head Brewery or Little Scrapper IPA from Half Pints in Winnipeg.

If you really enjoy pointless risks and sweating profusely from the back of your head, then you’re probably a suicide wings type of person. Usually, that means mixing Frank’s Red Hot and butter in equal proportion. In this case, you need something light and affordable because you’re going to need a lot of it to quell the heat: Bud Light or Coors Light fit the bill, but if you need the craft label cred, go with Mill Street Organic.

Currently, my favourite wings are from Morgan’s on the Danforth in Toronto. Their hoisin sauce wings are super, if a bit hard to pair with a brew. The combination of salty and sweet, and the tantalizing - if beer unfriendly - fermented soybeans that go into the sauce need acidity to slice through on your palate. Initially, I thought a lager with a really dry finish or a Belgian dubbel might do the job, but a dry draught cider will also do. Spirit Tree Pub Cider perfectly cuts through the sweetness and somehow makes sense of a relatively exotic ingredient.

Jordan St.John writes about beer at saintjohnswort.ca. He's currently up to his elbows in archival research.